Man and Wife (13 page)

Gene Kelly, I thought.
Singin’ in the Rain
. Just singing and dancing in the rain.

The courtyard was crowded when we arrived, but after a while the other children and their parents wandered off for drier, more sedate entertainment. But Pat couldn’t get enough of the mini-fountains that some genius had installed in the courtyard of that beautiful old building. So we stayed at Somerset House all afternoon, running through the water with our umbrellas above our heads. Soaked to the skin, our hearts pumping, and almost bursting with happiness.

Then as it started to get dark, we drove out to my mum’s place
and went to the old park. Just the three of us. My mother and my son and me, walking by the lake in the dusk of a November afternoon. The park was empty. Everyone gone. Last year’s leaves underfoot, and that winter smell in the air, fireworks and mist and another year slipping away.

And it reminded me of another day in this same park. The day we took the stabilisers off Bluebell, Pat’s bike.

I remembered my old man, the cancer already growing inside him, although we didn’t know it yet, running behind Bluebell, always losing ground, but saying those three words again and again.

I’ve got you.

I’ve got you.

I’ve got you.

Then, when it was dark, I took Pat home to his mother. I walked him to the door, and knelt in front of him, so that we were the same height.

Kissed him, told him to be a good boy, and squeezed him like I would never let him go.

And the next morning Pat, and his mother, and her new husband, all caught the plane to their new life in another country.

There was still no sign of Eamon.

The warm-up man had come and gone and the studio audience were getting restless. Their mood was darkening by the minute. They were here to have a good time and, as my mum would have put it, would laugh to see a pudding roll. But waiting for the star to show up was starting to feel too much like hard work. The cameramen looked bored. The autocue lady sat behind her monitor and did her knitting. The floor manager pressed his headphones and muttered something to the director up in the gallery. He looked over at me and shrugged.

‘I’ll get him,’ I said.

The dressing-room door was locked. I banged on it and called Eamon’s name. No reply. I banged harder this time, called him
a little gobshite, and told him to open up. Silence. And then, finally, the patter of classic trainers.

Eamon unlocked the door and as I went inside he sank to his knees and began searching for something under his dressing table. I cursed him, assuming he was looking for a few misplaced grains of cocaine. But it wasn’t that.

‘She’s here somewhere,’ he said. ‘I know she is – ah!’

He got up, a few grubby scraps of paper in his hand. He began spreading them on his dressing table, and putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle for the under-fives. It was a photograph of a girl. An East Asian woman. Dark. Lovely. Someone I had met.

‘Mem,’ he said. ‘My beautiful Mem. Oh, how could you be so cruel? I loved you so much, you dirty little bitch.’

I watched him assemble the photograph he had torn to pieces. It was a Polaroid, one of those pictures taken for lovers at tourist spots. A man and a woman on a summer’s day, squinting into the camera in front of Notre Dame. Eamon and his Mem in Paris.

‘What happened, Eamon?’

‘She’s married. Turns out she’s fucking
married.’

‘Mem’s married?’ I remembered Mem pulling off her dress in the table-dancing club where she worked. She didn’t look married. ‘But she always seemed so…single.’

‘Got a husband and a kid back in Bangkok. A little boy. Pat’s age. Turns out she’s been sending money to them all this time.’

‘Jesus.’ I put my arm around him. ‘I’m sorry, Eamon.’

‘We met up. To talk about getting back together. She seemed keen. Missing me. And I had bought her a ring. An engagement ring from Tiffany. A real one. Isn’t that a laugh? When she went to do whatever it is they do in the toilet, I tried to hide it in her wallet. Thought it would be a surprise. And that’s when I found the picture of her and the husband and the little kid. Bitch. I thought she meant it when she said she wanted to come back to me, Harry. But I was just a fucking cash-point machine.’

We both stared at the destroyed picture he was trying to put back together.

‘Do you think if I sellotaped it up it would look okay, Harry? What do you reckon? Or should I try superglue?’

‘Listen, Eamon. You have to worry about that later. There’s a few hundred people out there waiting for you to do
Fish on Friday.’

‘The show? How can I think about the show when Mem’s got a husband and kid?’

‘You have to. That’s what it’s all about. Going on when you don’t feel like it. Doing a great show when you’re down. This is the life you chose. You can’t take a night off because your heart got kicked around.’

‘Kicked around? It’s been mashed and mangled. The girl I wanted to be my wife can’t marry me because her husband wouldn’t like it. I need a line, Harry. It’s in my coat. I’ve been saving it for an emergency. And here it is. Chop a couple out, would you?’

Now it was my turn to be angry. I took the small packet of cocaine from his coat and flung it in his face.

‘Is she the reason you’re falling to pieces? Some girl? She’s got a husband and kid back in Thailand so you reach for the magic dust? Are you nuts? You’re going to throw it all away for one girl?’

‘Not one girl –
the
girl. Don’t you understand anything about love, you miserable bastard, Harry?’

‘Plenty, pal. Look, I know Mem’s a lovely-looking woman. But there are plenty more fish in the sea.’

‘And all of them so slippery, Harry.’

He picked up the cocaine and stuffed it in his pocket, followed by the scraps of torn-up photograph. Then he brushed past me, pausing at the dressing-room door.

‘Ah, but how could you ever understand, Harry? Sure, you’re a married man. What would you know about romance?’

The Sundays were the worst.

With Pat gone, the day of rest was never-ending.

I wandered around the house feeling lost, unable to recognise my life, while in the kitchen Peggy was helping Cyd to make her special recipe for dumplings.

I could tell that the dumplings were for Food Glorious Food
rather than our dinner because there must have been about six hundred of them. They were on silver trays all over the kitchen, these little packets of dough that my wife and her daughter were carefully stuffing with meat, chopped garlic and herbs, getting them ready for grilling.

‘Texan dumplings,’ Cyd said.

‘Like the cowgirls eat,’ Peggy said.

I stood in the doorway, watching the pair of them working. They were both bare-armed, wearing matching aprons, their black hair pulled back off their lovely faces. They looked as though they were having a great time.

‘Lonesome without him, huh?’ Cyd said.

I nodded, and she rubbed my arm. I didn’t have to explain how I felt on Sundays. She loved me enough to understand.

‘Need any help?’ I said.

‘What – from
you?’
Peggy said.

Cyd smiled. ‘Sure.’

Peggy showed me what to do.

You had to get a circle of dough, put some meat in the middle, sprinkle on the herbs and garlic, and then fold it shut, pinching the top together so that you got this pattern of indentations.

Surprisingly enough, I was completely crap at it. My overstuffed dumpling fell apart before it could even be placed on one of the silver trays. At first it was highly amusing to all three of us that my dumplings were rubbish. But after a while, as they continued to collapse, the joke wore thin.

‘Not like
that
, Harry,’ Peggy sighed. ‘You’re putting too much
stuff
inside.’

She showed me how to do it with her nimble fingers and soon my technique improved. I could tell that Peggy got a kick out of being the teacher, and for a while we were all working in happy dumpling-making harmony. Then from somewhere, I felt a kind of restlessness.

‘You know what?’ I said. ‘Maybe I’ll go and see my mum.’

‘Why don’t you?’ Cyd said. ‘She’d like that.’

‘Think you can manage here without me?’

They were both far too kind to answer such a silly question.

I wasn’t the only one who was missing Pat. There was a small boy outside our house. A good-looking, dirty-faced kid whose beat-up old bike was slightly too big for him.

‘Where’s Patrick then?’ he said.

‘Pat? Pat’s gone. He went last week. To America.’

The boy nodded.

‘I knew he was going. But I didn’t know if he was goned yet.’

‘Yes, he’s goned. Gone, I mean. Were you at school with him?’

But the kid had gone. Pedalling off on that bike that looked as though it had belonged to an older brother or sister. That small boy, wondering how he was going to fill his day without my son.

Bernie Cooper. Pat’s first best friend.

When I was a boy there were lots of people I could go to visit without warning.

All those friends whose doorsteps I could just turn up on, and know I would receive a warm welcome. Now the friends were all grown, and I was a man, and the only person in the world I could visit unannounced was my mum.

‘Harry,’ she said, letting me in. ‘Hello, love. I was just about to go out.’

I was dumbfounded.

‘On a Sunday? You’re going out on a Sunday?’

‘I’m going to the Union Hall with your Auntie Ethel. We’re going line dancing.’

‘Line dancing? What, that cowboy dancing? But I thought we could watch a bit of telly.’

‘Oh, Harry,’ laughed my mum. ‘I can watch telly when I’m dead.’

The door bell rang and a seventy-year-old cowgirl came inside. Instead of her usual sensible cardigan, floral skirt and chunky
Scholl sandals, Auntie Ethel from next door, who wasn’t really my auntie at all, was wearing a stetson, a fringed, spangly jacket and cowboy boots.

‘Hello, Harry love. Coming line dancing with us?’

‘You look great, Ethel,’ said my mum. ‘Annie get your gun.’

‘Granny get your gun, more like,’ said Auntie Ethel, and they both laughed like overflowing drains.

‘Ethel’s been before. She’s already a bit of an expert. Aren’t you, Ethel?’

Auntie Ethel smiled modestly. ‘I can do the Sleazy Slide, the Hardwood Stomp and the Crazy Legs. I’m still having problems with my Dime A Dance Cha Cha and my Shamrock Shuffle.’ She began to jerk stiffly around the living room, almost colliding with a lime-green pouffe. ‘Step forward on left, stomping weight on to it – hitch right knee slightly whilst swinging foot side to side – hitch right knee a little higher.’

‘Is that your Dime A Dance Cha Cha, Ethel?’

‘No, love, that’s my Shamrock Shuffle. And I’ll tell you what – it’s doing wonders for my lumbago.’

I looked at Auntie Ethel and then at my mum.

‘You’re not going out dressed like that,’ I told her.

But I needn’t have worried. My mum was going to see if she liked it before she bought any of the cowboy kit. I saw them off. And it was only when my mum was waiting for Auntie Ethel to edge her Nissan Micra out of the drive that she turned to me.

‘You’ll get him back, love. Don’t worry. We’ll get him back.’

‘Will we? I’m not so sure, Mum.’

‘Children need their dads.’

‘Dads don’t matter the way they used to in your day.’ ‘Every kid needs both of its parents, love. They do. It takes two to tango.’

I didn’t have the heart to point out to my mum that nobody did the tango any more.

Not even her.

Auntie Ethel beeped her horn and rolled down the window of her Nissan.

‘Wagons roll,’ she said.

It was after midnight when I got home.

The bed was full. Peggy was sleeping in her mother’s arms, sucking methodically on her thumb, her dark hair plastered to her bulging baby’s forehead, as if she was fighting a fever.

‘Bad dream,’ Cyd whispered. ‘Something about her dad falling off his motorbike. I’ll make sure she’s off and then take her back to her room.’

‘It’s okay. Keep her here.’

‘Do you mind, babe?’

‘No problem.’

So I kissed my wife and went to sleep on the sofa. And I truly didn’t mind. Peggy needed her mum tonight. And alone on the sofa I didn’t have to worry about Peggy waking up, or Cyd feeling too tired for sex, or if I was taking up too much of the duvet. There was nobody to cuddle downstairs, but also nobody to spoil my sleep.

That’s the thing about sleeping on sofas. You get used to it.

‘You need to get some romance back in your life,’ Eamon told me. He pushed some pasta from one side of the plate to the other. He wasn’t eating much these days. ‘Some excitement, Harry. Some passion. Nights when you don’t go to sleep because you can’t bear to be apart. You must remember all that. Think back, think hard.’

‘You think I should get my wife some flowers?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘I think you should get yourself a mistress.’

‘I love my wife.’

‘So what? Romance is a basic human right. Like food, water and shelter.’

‘You don’t mean romance. You mean getting your end away. You’re thinking about your nasty little knob. As usual.’

‘Call it what you will, Harry,’ eyeing up one of the waitresses as she took his uneaten food away. ‘But if you got a bit on the
side, you wouldn’t be harming your marriage. You would be keeping it together.’

‘Try explaining that to my wife.’

‘Ah, your wife wouldn’t know.’

‘But I would. You don’t understand. I don’t want a new woman. I just want my wife back. The way we were.’

‘You married men make me laugh,’ Eamon chuckled. ‘You complain about a lack of excitement under the old marital duvet. But you don’t have the nerve to go out and look for some. You know exactly what you want, but you don’t have the guts to get it.’

‘That’s what being married is all about.’

‘What – frustration? Disappointment? Disillusion? Sleeping with someone you don’t fancy? Sounds fucking great, Harry. Sounds terrific. Remind me to stay single.’

‘I still fancy Cyd,’ I said, and I meant it.